From the beginning, Microsoft has tried to set its nascent augmented reality technology, dubbed HoloLens, apart from competing VR solutions. While VR companies like Oculus and Sony’s Playstation VR have focused on showcasing how virtual reality creates new opportunities to explore games and distant worlds, Microsoft’s AR demos have dedicated themselves to showing how augmented reality concepts can overlay and interact with real life. Now, the software giant has revealed the upcoming HoloLens developer edition — and its $3,000 price tag.

Reactions to the developer kit have been mixed so far. There’s no doubt that so-called “mixed reality” games can offer some interesting experiences; Microsoft’s own demo on the show floor showed robots breaking into a mocked-up living room and attacking a player. The spider bots are aware of the layout of furniture and other room objects as well as other creatures generated by the AR title — as a larger robot breaks into the room, the smaller robots scuttle to get out of its way. They can be destroyed by the player and can fire projectiles at him (as shown below).

Unlike VR kits, which all require some additional device support (even if that’s just a mobile phone), the HoloLens is its own self-contained unit. Exactly which hardware components are used in the system is unclear, but we’ve heard rumors of an x86 processor, 60Hz refresh rate, and 2GB of RAM in total. Earlier this year, there were rumors that HoloLens used a custom Intel Cherry Trail processor — whether this is still true with the upcoming developer kits isn’t something Redmond is willing to tell the public just yet. Microsoft also claims to have developed its own holographic processor unit, or HPU, based on a custom silicon design.

The living room demo

The full demo video can be seen below — if you want to skip to the actual game demonstration, it starts around the 1:15 mark.

As tech demos go, this one is fairly impressive, but it also raises some questions Microsoft hasn’t historically been good at answering. Once upon a time, the new hot technology from Microsoft wasn’t HoloLens but Project Natal, later called Kinect. Like HoloLens, Kinect was going to revolutionize gaming by turning your entire body into a controller. In reality, turning someone’s entire body into a controller wasn’t actually much fun. It made it nearly impossible to control player movement through a game world or to perform complex tasks. Without buttons to press, players were reliant on swipes or other large motions.

If Microsoft had focused on making Kinect integration game-enhancing — by, for example, allowing players to use military sign language to issue orders to squadmates in games like Battlefield 3 or 4, then the technology might have taken off or at least earned a devoted following in specific titles. Instead, Kinect was generally ignored after the initial flurry of launch titles. By the time the Xbox One launched, Kinect 2 integration was seen as a negative, not a positive.

Microsoft’s living room demo is impressive, but it’s not actually a living room. And these sorts of demos appear to position HoloLens to have some of the same problems as Kinect did — when your controller is your body, you need ample room to move, fire, and engage. People in small houses / apartments (or those that simply own some bulky furniture) are going to be less able to interact with Microsoft’s AR tech in the ways the company seems to think will be most valuable.

Like Kinect or the IllumiRoom, the expertise and conceptual ideas behind HoloLens are amazing. Whether that expertise is sufficient to transform the product into something consumers want to own is entirely another question.

Tagged In

When you’re wearing the lens you’ll have the first person view. We were looking at them through a camera wearing a hololens. In other words, more than one person can see the same holographs from different angles in the room. You can have multiple-people shooting at the same objects in real-time.

IKROWNI

isnt this seen as like a letter box view in front of the viewer though? that would really be a deal breaker. Then to top it all off look at how slow he made all of his movements. it really doesnt look like it can handle quick movement very well.

Tom

It possibly can’t. At least, maybe not gracefully. But it is unfair to be certain about that, since we’ve never seen an example of fast movement with HoloLens.

I think for a first pass, they’re doing pretty well. This is a holographic augmented reality user interface device. Think about that for a second. That’s frigging awesome. It’s a big, clunky first pass at what could be a game-changer for the way we do computing. I am honestly far more excited about this than VR, and I froth at the mouth about that often enough as it is.

IKROWNI

Personally I’m more excited for magic leap than hololens. With Microsoft hardware it’s always about cutting edges on everything to reap the most they can. Magic leap has been worked on for years and has some of the biggest names in the industry throwing money at them. I would have to say that projecting holograms onto your retina would give much better results than a clunky Viser that can only be seen in letterbox mode.

bret bowlby

I have to agree, Magic Leap and the direct light projection seems to be a better way to go. There really hasn’t been much news coming from them lately however. I hope they’ll give further news here before the end of 2015.

IKROWNI

Well I do know they just spent a bunch building a new light processor chip manufacturing plant with some of the half billion in funding they recieved here in Florida.

They also released this demo of it being used that looks much better than microsofts hololens showing.

I thought they just used kinect style tracking and produced an overlay, instead of actually looking through the hololens.

Lampshade

This article makes the Kinect sound like a failure. In reality, the Kinect was a huge success in several areas of technology development, most of which were well outside of gaming. Problems with how well to use controls in tiny apartments are irrelevant to the actual ways people will use these things when available. The Holo looks like it could also inspire a lot of interesting development… though the $3000 dev kit price tag is a bit ominous. I hope that consumer versions will be intended for distribution with the Xbox — not because I want to use it for gaming, but because such a distribution scheme would require a reasonable price! I’d also like to see a consumer version with a much, much larger field of view. The tiny window the current demo uses is pretty lame.

Joel Hruska

“This article makes the Kinect sound like a failure. In reality, the
Kinect was a huge success in several areas of technology development,
most of which were well outside of gaming.”

I can’t speak to how Kinect may have moved the ball forward in fields well outside of gaming. I know I saw some interesting projects and concepts, but I’m not aware of anyone bringing those projects and concepts to market.

That doesn’t mean that R&D is useless, of course, but as far as gamers are concerned, Kinect was a bust. If Microsoft wants to pivot and market HoloLens as an AR tool for business development or physical therapy or half a dozen other things, it certainly has the freedom to do so — but thus far, it’s spent more time demoing games and concepts like an AR-boosted version of Minecraft.

KIMS

NPR had a segment on an experimental wing of a hospital that used it to monitor that patients where not ‘sleep walking’ away, alerting staff if they got out of bed or went missing etc. Similar project was also underway in a nursing home, if I remember correctly. They used a network of kinects to monitor the whole sector. . apart from the 1984 aspect of it, use-cases like that exist and enhance patient safety and care levels given.

Kevin Moore

I think the point is that Microsofts vision and intent with kinect was not what the community wanted. Kinect is a genius product that has enhanced technology in many other areas other than gaming as well. But it is absolutely accurate to say that it will never be a replacement to a controller or sit down gaming; which is how MS originally envisioned it. Some game developers have corrected this by subtly and thoughtfully incorporated it into their games in ways that enhance rather than replace. Microsoft’s problem has always been trying to force their method and ideals onto others rather than letting the community provide it’s own direction and then responding. If you can read and honestly interpret the direction of the community then you can predict what product will be successful and how it will be used. Microsoft likes to bulldoze a straight path when the natural course wants to bend and curve

Guest

I hate how every time people talk about the Hololens (or anything at all really) it always comes down to games. It’s always about games. Doesn’t anyone else see the potential for these tools to help people learn, interact, and revolutionize creation? I honestly think the creators of this technology are begrudgingly including gaming as a part of their presentation because they have to in order to placate the top contender for the noisiest group on the internet — ‘gamers’.

Edit: By the way I wasn’t necessarily talking about the article or the writer in question, but more the inevitable comments that will talk about how useless it is for gaming, or how it’s gimmicky or whatnot…

gincoleman

I’ve seen plenty about applications for doctors, architects and designers. Gaming is a multi-billion-dollar industry, though. That will be a huge demographic.

Joel Hruska

” Doesn’t anyone else see the potential for these tools to help people
learn, interact, and revolutionize creation? I honestly think the
creators of this technology are begrudgingly including gaming as a part
of their presentation because they have to in order to placate the top
contender for the noisiest group on the internet — ‘gamers’.”

I do. And in some of my previous stories, I’ve referenced Microsoft’s concepts for how you could use HoloLens for 3D drafting or model creation, for example. There are certainly many conceptual ways to use a device like this.

But when it comes to creating an ecosystem, API, and a set of best practices, many of the technologies used in gaming can actually be extremely useful for other practices.

Think about what a game *is.* It’s a complex set of environmental queues that update in real-time. It includes high-resolution and detailed models that have their own animations or representations of data. Most games are capable of rendering complicated lighting models or shadow maps, again in real time.

So if you make a HoloLens that can perform well at gaming, you’ve also created a HoloLens that can perform well at many other non-gaming tasks that happen to rely on low-latency connections or fast rendering of complicated datasets.

KIMS

Didn’t Airbus or Boeing look at integrating the hololens with their smart tool program? Essentially the hololens would recognize and overlay aircraft build plans and spec’s on bolts etc., and would also issue appropriate settings/commands to the tool, AND be used to sign/validate parts of the inspection chain. Essentially a person with this equipment would be visually guided to the bolts that require inspection, be presented with the correct procedure, the tool set to the correct torque, then when the human performs the task, it is logged and signed in a traceable format in the inspection or build report.. There are some truly remarkable synergistic things starting to happen in manufacturing..

Tom

As someone in that sort of industry… yes, a lot of these companies are interested in this sort of thing. Pretty much exactly what you describe is the sort of thing we want to explore with HoloLens and similar HMDs. The issue for HoloLens as-is, is it doesn’t look particularly robust. Some of our tools come back looking like they’ve survived an atomic bomb blast.

Phobos

It looks very interesting.

EVHappy

Next year will be very interesting with all these new AR / VR devices coming out. However, it will be about five more years to really see how it all shakes out.

Mahmet Tokarev (Tajik Pride)

Microsoft often comes up with cool ideas but actually getting the full potential usually takes much longer than they expect. Surface always had a lot of potential, but it’s just now getting to the point where I would consider getting one. Windows Continuum seems like it would be great but without having a desktop mode and windowed browsing it just falls far short of what it should be. I’ll probably get a Hololens at some point, but it probably won’t be before 2020.

Kevin Moore

Augmented reality has a lot of potential but not as traditional gaming. It can enhance gaming. For example you have traditional sit down games with an option for augmented reality that functions as extended display, HUD, or other enhancing features. It can work miracles for specialty niches and applications such as pokemon go. It has lots of day to day living enhancements from R&R/tranquility applications or as an extended workstation allowing you use whatever is in your environment to interact with mundane applications like day planners smart home applications or internet browsing. There’s lots of cool things it can do but if it’s going to get any kind of wide range acceptance then it’s going to need to leverage the full spectrum of its abilities. A company marketing it solely as one thing is just going to kill it and brand it as a niche product. I think though that ultimately people can see the potential beyond the niche market. What we need is a good scifi, cyber punk movie that utilizes it and solidifies it’s market and integration in everyday life.

VirtualMark

Wow, that demo looked pretty awesome! Now I have to buy 2 VR headsets lol.

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